James Graham wrote:
> That rather misses the point of "pave the cowpaths" though -- the idea
> is to preferentially spec things that have become common practice over
> things which have not.
Yes, I do understand that; my problem is that whilst it is easy
to demonstrate that there are $>n$ documents in the wild that
use 'class="copyright"', it is infinitely harder to demonstrate
the intention of the authors in using that construct beyond
the two usages I gave previously (CSS & DOM). It therefore
seems very unsafe to /assume/ that all usages are in conformance
with the usage now proposed (indeed, earlier posters have shewn
clearly that this is not the case), and since earlier documents
were written at a time when one could use class names with
arbitrary semantics (a time tha still exists, b.t.w.), I cannot
see that ascribing particular semantics to a widely used construct
is actually "paving the cowpath". As I said earlier, it is more
like deliberately causing the to fork.
If I may adduce a programming analogy, it would be like
suddenly specifying that the open brace /must/ follow
the function name on the same line, and that the
matching close brace /must/ occur on its own in
column-1 one or more lines later. That may well
ratify 85% of existing practice, but it renders
illegal all documents using the earlier (Algol-68)
convention of indenting the first brace on the
line following the function name, and having
the matching close brace some lines below in the
same column.
Philip Taylor